The virtuoso pianist and composer Antonio Ruiz Pipó was born in Granada, Spain. He studied the piano with Alicia de Larrocha and composition with Salvador Bacarisse and others. The latter part of his productive life was spent in France where, in addition to pursuing his performing career, he taught at the École Normale de Musique and the Conservatoire de Musique in Paris. In his youth he played the guitar a little and this provided him with a working knowledge of the instrument, for which he wrote numerous works. His music is consistently tonal, his treatment and harmonization of his thematic material (often deceptively simple-sounding) is sophisticated, and he revels in sharp contrasts of mood and color.